Twitter is building
Twitter today announced plans to build “the next generation of the Twitter API” that will provide more flexibility and better serve developers. As a first step, the company is launching Twitter Developer Labs, a program to let developers preview new features and test new API products before they are finalized. Participating developers will be asked to provide feedback on what they like and don’t like ahead of the broad rollout.
Twitter announced Twitter API version 1.1 in August 2012. The social network and what developers use it for have changed a lot since then. Twitter has added enterprise data APIs and the Ads API, but the main API has largely stagnated. At the same time, Twitter has burned developers again and again.
The company now insists it wants to simplify its services for developers, make them easier to use, and offer more features. The Twitter Developer Labs program is the first step, so developers can test new API endpoints and be part of the process.
“We know that we have to rebuild trust with some groups of developers, and that we have to maintain trust with everybody building on our platform,” Twitter product manager Ian Cairns told VentureBeat. “And I think that the Labs program is a very clear, concrete example of how we intend to do that. By inviting them to give us feedback on what we’re building, and including their voices in the future of the platform.”
Twitter plans to “update significant portions of our existing API, and make some foundational changes like new data definitions and endpoint structures.
